The Tulip Nebula

The Tulip Nebula

This beautiful little emission nebula is 6000 light years removed from us.

One of the fascinating things about this region is the objext Cygnus X-1 that is lurking close by.

Cygnus X-1 is a galactic X-ray source discovered in 1971 and one of the first confirmed black holes. It orbits one of the stars in this picture which I highlighted below. It’s actually possible to image the bow shock caused by this interaction, but this would require some monochrome sensor.

Star HDE 226868 is a blue supergiant feeding Cygnus X-1 with stellar winds.

The Elephant’s Trunk – revisited

The Elephant’s Trunk – revisited

The year is flying by. It feels like only days ago I was sitting outside in the cold trying to image galaxies. Summer skies are exciting: the milky way is up and we have some amazing stars now to observe like Vega, Antares, Sadr, Deneb and many others. Late in the night Andromeda is now visible too and at the dawn of day Jupiter is appearing.

I imaged the IC1396 region 2 months ago but I decided to give it another go with some different framing and post processing.

The Ghost of Cassiopeia

The Ghost of Cassiopeia

This nebula is an eerie, ghostlike figure composed by gas and dust, illuminated by the massive star Navi aka Gamma Cassiopeia.

This was not easy. I’m currently encountering a bunch of issues that I yet have to properly identify. After I completed my polar alignment and focusing I was noticing really weird star patterns on my first few images. This is one of the frustrating bits of astrophotography. Such patterns could be due poor guiding, focusing issues, backfocus, tilt, spacing etc. On bright targets it’s easy to process away but on much dimmer objects like this one it’s a real challenge. I’ll need to investigate and fix this.

Anyway. This is one of my targets for this year and I’m happy with this first set of data. I will probably revisit this later this year when the nebula is higher up the sky and I will increase integration time as I’ve only been able to get 3 hours here.

The Lagoon Nebula

The Lagoon Nebula

I set up late on Saturday without knowing what to expect. Clearoutside was predicting orange conditions, Ventusky was giving me mixed signals on clouds and according to my phone we would have clear conditions till 4 AM. In the end I had a lot of clouds but most of them away from my target. I decided to go for the Lagoon Nebula, one of the lowest targets I can image. My guiding was not optimal and I had some tilt issues I couldn’t resolve but I managed to get around 2 hours worth of data.

This is a really cool nebula. It’s huge (angular size is 3 times the full moon) and there’s so much complexity caused by hot young stars, stellar winds and nebulosity.

I decided to play around with the HOO normalization scripts from Bill Blanshan and this is the result I got.

Back to deep space – the Bubble Nebula

Back to deep space – the Bubble Nebula

After a short walk in our solar system it’s back to the Milky Way.

This is a very bright emission nebula in Cassiopeia, about 8.500 light-years from us. The “bubble” is created by the stellar winds of a hot central star.

Staring at the sun

Staring at the sun

First ever go at solar photography. This is the result of 300 exposures of 0.001 second taken with my telescope and a Baader ND5 film. We can actually count the different sun spots and there’s even some real detail in them. Very cool.

The sun is a yellow dwarf but it’s not really yellow. It emits all visible wavelength colors evenly and so it appears white from space. Our atmosphere gives it the warm yellow-orange color we all know. Here is a side-by-side from the orginal processed capture and the adjusted color curves.

Venus

Venus

In a couple days Venus will be at greatest eastern elongation. Getting any detail out of Venus is a real challenge though. But the real joy here is the simplicy of the setup:

A simple dobsonian telescope, equatorial platform and planetary camera.

No guiding, no cable mess, no polar alignment, no balancing or any of the other mess that is needed for deep space astrophotography. I look forward to planetary season to image Neptune, Mercury and Uranus later this year.

The Wizard Nebula

The Wizard Nebula

I had 3 clear nights in a row during this weekend. These are difficult times, the galaxies are fading away from us and the summer objects are still very low. I spent the nights imaging this wonderful nebula and did some work on Cygnus Wall and crescent Venus.

I also did an attempt at HOO:

The Pillars of Creation

The Pillars of Creation

At my latitude I wasn’t really sure how well this would go. The Eagle Nebula is sitting in the constellation Serpens, which for me means aiming my telescope South, which also means the glow of one of the busiest highways in the country. I managed to get around 2.5 hours of data in the end between 1AM-4AM. I might revisit this object a few times in the coming weeks and months.

This nebula is most known for the Pillars of Creation, huge towers of gas and dust, imaged by the Hubble ST in 1995 resulting in what’s probably its most popular image. Recently it was also revisited by the James Webb ST.